


Not A Lack Of Love

by violentdarlings



Category: Parade's End - All Media Types
Genre: Awkward Romance, Christopher is rather out of his depth, Dirty Talk, Edwardian Period, F/M, Marriage, Neglected Fandom, Sex, Sexual Inexperience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-24
Packaged: 2018-03-31 22:53:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3996145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violentdarlings/pseuds/violentdarlings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things are sweet between Sylvia and Christopher, in the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not A Lack Of Love

_“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”_

_― Friedrich Nietzsche_

 

He finds her in their bedroom on their wedding night, still scarcely able to believe this is real. She’d gone ahead and changed into a nightgown; he’d disrobed separately and come to her in his pyjamas. Christopher draws in a deep breath and pushes open the door.

“Husband,” Sylvia greets him, sitting at her dressing table pulling a brush through her hair. She smiles at him in the glass and foolishly, Christopher finds himself smiling back, closing the door gently behind him.

“Wife,” he returns. Despite knowing the circumstances of their marriage, Christopher can’t help but feel a small warm flush of purely male pride, that this beauty is his own. He’s about to continue when she rises, slipping into the large bed with the covers already turned back. She pulls them up over her, and Christopher feels a chump, still hovering in the doorway. Gingerly, he slides into bed beside her. The whole situation feels bizarre.

“Christopher –”

“We don’t have to,” he interrupts her, even though it’s frightfully rude. “Sylvia.” Her laughter is low and musical.

“I suppose we’ve already had our wedding night,” she replies, and Christopher doesn’t dare to look at her, staring straight ahead. The thought had occurred to him; also, one mistake in a train compartment and he’s ruined his whole life. “But I’d like to, if you want it.” Oh, God, he wants it. The flesh is weak and he wants her.

“Why me?” he asks instead of taking her in his arms like he wants to, and likes Sylvia a fraction more when she does not pretend to misunderstand.

“I don’t know,” she says slowly. “I saw you, on the train. Sitting there with that silly smile on your face. And all I wanted…”

“Yes?” he prompts, when she falls silent. Perhaps it is the light, or perhaps there is a faint blush on Sylvia’s cheeks.

“All I wanted was to push you to the floor, pull up my skirts and sit on your face,” she finishes, and the raw imagery her filthy words conjure is so acute, Christopher feels a stirring below the belt. A thickening, a heaviness growing where there was none before. He’s no stranger to the needs of the flesh, he endured the same adolescent pangs as any lad. Yet he’d never acted on them, before Sylvia. Never wanted to. She had been the first.

And now, the last.

“Ah,” he manages. “Well. I’m –”

“I know you’re not glad about what we did,” she says, when it becomes obvious he cannot continue. “But I’m your wife, now. There is no dishonour in it anymore.” She is wrong about that. The dishonour of getting a child on an unwed woman will never go away. But at least now the shame is his alone, not displayed to the world for all to see. He wants to tell her this, but he knows she will not understand. It’s not that she’s a woman; it’s that she’s a modern woman, and his ideals are antiquated, to say the least.

“What about the child?” Christopher asks instead, aware of his excuses being torn away one by one. Sylvia smiles like a cat confronted with a helpless canary.

“Is in no danger if we, ah, consummate our marriage. I asked.”

“Who?” Christopher asks with a momentary flicker of suspicion. Sylvia doesn’t seem to notice.

“My mother,” she replies, and Christopher breathes out a sigh of relief he hadn’t known he was holding in. He will never ask her about other lovers, he vows. He will not be that man. Any she had had before him is past.

“Very sensible of you,” he says, and means it as a compliment, although he is not to learn until much later that it is not the sort of compliment Sylvia likes. But all is new now and she smiles, inches a little closer, and Christopher plucks up his nerve to kiss her.

He’s expecting a quick, chaste peck. He’ll consider (ruefully) later that he really ought to know Sylvia better than that by now. But at this moment he is stunned when she chases him with her mouth, parts her lips to lick at the seam of his mouth with her tongue. Shocked, Christopher opens it on instinct, and she presses the advantage, brushing her tongue against his open lips, exploring his open mouth, taking his lower lip between her teeth and biting ever so gently. For all he’s been inside her, this is the most brazenly intimate thing that’s ever happened to him, and God help him, Christopher _loves_ it.

Someone is making a pained, low sound, and Christopher is astonished to realise, as if from a distance, that it is him. He tears his lips away. “I’m so sorry,” he apologises to his wife, who stares at him like he’s from another planet. He squirms under the intensity of her gaze, shamefully aroused from just a kiss.

“Don’t you dare,” she replies. “Don’t be sorry for that.” She takes the hem of her nightgown in her hands and brings it up over her head in one rapid move. Christopher blinks, mesmerised by the sudden display of ivory skin, of perfect breasts with rosy nipples, of the dark shadow between her legs.

“Oof!” he grunts when, with startling grace, his nude wife rolls on top of him. Christopher, propped up against the headboard, experiences a dual sensation of desire and panic, but he cannot get away. Not from Sylvia, who leans forward for another kiss, and Christopher’s hands creep up without conscious order from his mind to brace themselves on the dainty curve of her waist, still without sign of the child.

_Their_ child. The sudden thought has him harder against her as a primal heat flows through his veins. _His_ woman, _his_ child. Christopher is horrified by the sudden rawness that possesses him, turning him from a gentleman to little more than a beast in barely an instant. God, but he wants to throw her down on the bed, part those heavenly thighs and bury his rigid _cock_ (he shudders just to think the word) in her wetness.

Wetness. For all Sylvia is mewling sweet and deep in her throat as she rocks gently against him, Christopher doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to please a woman. Especially one such as Sylvia. God, she’d taken him straight to heaven in that little interlude on the train. He’d been so caught up in new sensation, it hadn’t even occurred to him to help her find her pleasure. And then there hadn’t been time, there’d been such a mad scramble to get clothes back on and –

“You’re thinking too much,” Sylvia says, tapping his nose gently, and Christopher realises with a flood of horror that he’d been lost in thought, staring slack into space like an idiot.

“Forgive me,” he mutters, and Sylvia smiles, brilliant as the sun and just as dangerous.

“As your wife, I must give you something to distract you,” she replies, and Christopher is about to ask what when she slips off of him, lies back bare and beautiful on top of his bed, and parts her thighs. And oh Lord she is taking his hand, guiding it down between her breasts (how he wants to fill his hands with them) and to thread through the prickle and curl of the hair at her most secret place. It is too much and not enough, it is all happening too fast, but he cannot bring himself to stop.

“I’ve never done this before,” Christopher finds himself confessing, brutally honest as ever in spite of the shame that comes with it. A slim hand touches his cheek, forces him to meet Sylvia’s eyes.

“I’ve never done this _with you_ before,” she says simply, and it gives him courage. He flutters his fingertips against the hair that manages to be both silky and a trifle spiky, and to his astonishment, she shivers.

“Is this… do you like this?” he asks, dipping his fingers lower into the surprising well of wetness that greets him. He starts in shock, so unexpected is the slick of her arousal on his fingers.

“Yes,” she breathes, and does the most astonishing thing. She dips her head forward and takes one of his fingers between her lips, suckling the evidence of her arousal from first one finger, then another, then all. Christopher is so hard he can’t breathe, can’t stop his mind from imagining the wet heat of her mouth in _other places_ , as ungentlemanly as it is. He’s aware he’s beet red with embarrassment but Sylvia doesn’t seem to notice. She takes his hand from her mouth and pushes it down, to return to where it was before. “Oh, Christopher,” she murmurs, and he can’t believe this is real.

He is plain and boring and dull and Sylvia is a goddess, and he has no idea what to do. He touches her tentatively, going so far as to press one fingertip into the slickness of her. “Dear God,” he hears himself rasp as he takes the sight of her in; bare breasts heaving, head twisted to one side in pleasure. “You want this,” he realises dimly. “You want me.” Sylvia’s nod almost undoes him. Distracted, his hand twitches and bumps against something small and hard, like a tiny pebble amidst the silk of her flesh. He thinks to apologise but Sylvia moans, throaty and guttural, and arches her hips against his hand. “There, Christopher, God, there,” and she presses his fingers back against the little bump, teaches his fingers to dance over it until she is trembling.

He hardly realises she is speaking, and then when he hears her, he wonders how he ever could have missed it. “God, God, please, oh you wretched man, don’t stop.” And other things, words he never could have imagined spilling from that rosebud mouth. _Fuck_ and _hell_ and – “more more more, oh I’m so close Christopher, please –”

He doesn’t stop. How could he, with the music of her desire urging him on, sending fire into his blood? Christopher frigs her until his wrist aches, unused to this new form of exercise, until her hips buck up and she tangles her hand with his free one, her grip ferocious. There are no more words, now, just a delicious string of _ohs_ and moans and he almost stops in raw shock when her body bends like a willow branch, arching in the middle, her hips slamming up against his hand over and over. There is a gush of wetness over his fingers that perversely he longs to taste, and he doesn’t stop his movements until finally she sinks down, utterly spent.

Christopher thinks he could die now, happy, the sound of her pleasure still ringing in his ears. Except inside his pyjama trousers he’s rigid and unsatisfied, and for all he’s been inside Sylvia before, he wants it again more than life. Yet he’d be content to lie here for the rest of the night (the rest of his life, a small traitor voice whispers), smell her on the air.

But there are small hands unbuttoning his shirt, and while he was lost in a reverie (and a smidgen of male self-congratulation), Sylvia had recovered. “You don’t need to do that,” Christopher protests feebly, but he forgets how to make words when Sylvia leans down and licks his nipple. “What are you?” he marvels as she pushes his pyjama shirt back over his shoulders. “I’d never even thought to –”

Her hands are small and deft, freeing him from the constriction of his trousers. Christopher can’t hold back a gasp when she wraps her hands around the length of him and starts to stroke. The feeling is ridiculously good and he bites his lip to keep his traitor mouth from making a sound.

“Don’t.” Christopher cracks open an eyelid to find his wife staring intently at him. “Don’t be quiet. I want to hear you.” Christopher shudders.

“But it’s not – not seemly,” he manages, somehow keeping his voice level when Sylvia does a complicated twisting thing with her hand that feels too good to bear.

“Didn’t you like hearing me?” Sylvia asks, and Christopher feels himself swell in her grasp just at the memory. “Ah,” she says knowingly. “I can feel how much you liked it.” Christopher closes his eyes again; he can’t bear to look at her, not with his control hanging by a thread. “Let go, Christopher,” she says, and Christopher shakes his head violently. “Stubborn,” she says, but her voice is fond. Abruptly her hand is gone and Christopher barely has time to wonder where before something wet and tight sinks down on him and his eyes roll back into his head.

He opens his eyes. Sylvia is pressed close, so close, her breasts rubbing against his chest with every bounce of her on him. Her eyes are brilliant so close up, and oh, Christopher likes this, it’s reminiscent of last time but so much better with no clothes to serve as barriers between them. Unbidden a moan rises in his throat when she makes a similar noise, and then she starts to speak.

“You feel so good, Christopher,” she says. “So good. I’m so wet for you, can you feel it?” Shaking, he nods his assent. “Tell me.”

“I can feel it,” he gasps. “Oh, God.” But she continues. She’s merciless; he’ll know all about it, someday, but in this moment her ruthlessness is delicious.

“All wet and tight and all yours.” He growls and thrusts up to meet her, patience stretched almost to breaking point. “Yours and no one else’s, Christopher.”

It’s too much. Abruptly he seizes her by the hips and rolls, taking her with him, relishing her quick burst of surprised, delighted laughter. They land somewhat clumsily but Christopher is spreading her legs, sinking himself all the way into her, and starting to move. He thrusts fast and hard, driven by instinctual movement, and later he will recall the words and noises he utters and burn with shame, but not now.

“Wife, beautiful wife, you’re so good, so perfect, I love you –” Something like surprise blooms across Sylvia’s face, but she tightens her arms around him as Christopher feels the world go white around the edges. His hips are moving hard and fast now and he doesn’t want to stop, he _can’t stop_ , _and it’s too soon but he has no choice –_

There are fingers combing his sweaty hair and he’s aware of his face tucked into the curve of Sylvia’s neck. Christopher stiffens, humiliated by his weakness now the tide of desire has abated. Disgusted by the things he’d said, when lust had made him just like every other man, a mindless beast intent on spilling its seed. Christopher silently vowed to be better from now on, to not be so easily led by the charms of his wife.

Yet he does not seek his discarded sleepwear. He allows himself to fall asleep in the arms of his wife, to slip into slumber still joined with her, his seed sticky on her thighs.

Christopher sleeps.


End file.
